The advantages of integration, the downsides of a monopoly

What makes Apple so brilliant from a business perspective is that it has managed to, via hardware and software integration, earn monopoly profits in a way that would not normally be classified as a monopoly. Still, it seems to me that while“integration” results in good outcomes,“monopoly” doesn’t.

The main example he picked to illustrate the problems caused by this“monopoly” position — the one where we can argue that Apple has a monopoly on Mac hardware for MacOS for instance — is obviously the“butterfly mechanism” MacBook keyboards. Users of MacOS were stuck with unreliable keyboards for their newly-bought laptops, and they still are if you look a the current lineup: only the brand new 16-inch has the new“fixed” scissor-mechanism keyboard.

Why did this faulty hardware stick for so long? Short answer is: nobody else is building MacOS hardware.